The Metropolitan Museum of Art is among the most-visited institutions across the globe, and is home to many of the world’s most influential pieces of art. During our 2-hour Met After Dark tour, we’ll get the chance to see the museum in the rare beauty of evening light, as the crowds dissipate for the day. We’ll explore selected works in the museum’s collection with an expert in art history, whose specialized knowledge and tailored approach will help bring these artworks to life.
Met Museum at Night
We’ll begin the tour with a sunset viewing of the Temple of Dendur, exploring the monumental temple as if on the shore of the Nile at dusk. We’ll then work our way through the American Wing, where the building’s original copper lights illuminate the wing’s emblematic golden Diana sculpture.
Depending on the group’s interests, we’ll weave our way through tucked corridors to discover some of the museum’s most beautiful hidden gems, like a Ming Dynasty garden, larger-than-life Rodin sculptures, and starlit Roman busts.
No matter what your interest or level of expertise, our expert art historian will ensure you’ll leave the museum with a deeper understanding of the collections and better tools to view art, all in time for dinner!
Booking Instructions

A specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art, Irina Oryshkevich teaches art and architectural history at Columbia University where she also earned her PhD in 2003. She has published numerous articles in her field, worked for several New York Old Master galleries, and received fellowships for her academic work from the National Gallery in Washington, the Fulbright Foundation, the Getty, the Society of Fellows and the Italian Academy (both at Columbia) and the American Philosophical Society. In addition to teaching in her area of specialization, Irina, a native New Yorker with a deep interest in local history, has been offering a class on the architecture of New York City at Columbia for the past four years.

Louis Mazzari has taught American history, art, and literature for a dozen years in Istanbul, Turkey, at Bogazici University, the country’s most renowned university, and he now also teaches in the City University of New York system. He has published books and articles on the cultural and political history of the U.S. with the university presses of LSU, Yale, and South Carolina. His New York work has included a study of the documentary aesthetic of photographer Berenice Abbott. Mazzari previously served as managing editor of the anthropology journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and he worked on the editorial staff of the Harvard Educational Review. His years in a variety of classrooms have focused on the intersection of the artwork and its cultural history, and he speaks to American art’s profusion and its diversity of intentions and effects. That mix of art and culture is at the center of his presentation of the abundance of the Met’s American Wing.

Born in England but raised in Amherst, MA, John is a specialist in modern and contemporary art history and is always especially excited to share his knowledge of these fields. He received a PhD from Emory University in 2015. His dissertation analyzes new art forms that emerged in the 1960s. From 2015-2017, he was a postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the National Gallery of Art. He has taught at Harvard University, the Pratt Institute, the Fashion Institute of Technology, George Washington University, and UMass. Whether offering introductory surveys or specialized graduate courses, he always leads classes on visits to area art galleries and museums. John is the author of articles in various peer-reviewed journals and has delivered papers and lectures at a range of institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Princeton University, and Harvard. Additionally, he was the recipient of major fellowships from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the American Council of Learned Societies/Henry Luce Foundation. Prior to graduate school, John taught English in Salamanca, Spain. He offers tours in Spanish and is accustomed to interactions with non-native speakers of English.
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